Forsaken Albania

By Artan Lame
Tirana, April 1939. On 6 April the Italians sailed out of their ports, on 7 April they landed in Durr쳬 on 8 April they entered Tirana and on 9 April Mussolini ordered the creation of a Transitory Administration in Tirana, which was to lay the grounds for union with Italy. At this point the plan fell over, because the Fathers of the Nation had not waited, but had already created this organism one day earlier on 8 April. To this day, 68 years later, it is not so much the invasion but the reaction of the Albanian State, beginning with the King down through the entire pyramid of the State that remains one of the most shameful of pages in our modern history. No one claims that we could have worked a miracle to fight back Italy, but to put an end to national independence in that outrageous manner is a tremendous shame.
The first photograph shows the Act of the creation of the Provisional Administrative Committee with the date of 9 April, but the Committee had already been created the day before. The Act is drafted in two languages Albanian and Italian and also bears the signatures of its members, beginning with Xhafer Ypi. The text begins with the phrase, “On 9 April, 1939, after the entrance into Tirana of the glorious Italian troops, theƥtc, etc, was set up.” Incredible! At these really dramatic moments, no one compelled the drafters to use such watery phrases, moreover in the Memoirs of many top Italian Military, who were part of this invasion, their descriptions of this moment smack of disdain for a people who did not even reserve a degree of dignity for the fall of their country.
The other photograph was taken three days later, on 12 April. The Constitutional Assembly has been summoned to the Assembly Hall, which was to offer the Albanian Crown to King Emanuel the Third, who, right to the end continued repeating in close circles, “I don’t want that pile of rocks.” Once again Xhafer Ypi reads out the papers drafted at the Italian Representation, while the hall, full of the Fathers of the Nation vote in favour. A very big clock, taller than a man, stands against the wall. Curiosity: For more than thirty years this clock has stood in the ante-Chamber of the office of the Prime Minister of Albania, where it continues to work away in peace, despite everything it has witnessed over the years. At the head of the room, a portrait of Scanderbeg hangs, in whose famous footsteps these men failed to follow, not for lack of desire, but probably because their prostates played up on them.
It was in all of this miserable demise of the first period of our national independence, that the resistance movement found its inspiration, particularly the communist movement, which, if only Albanian politics has conducted itself with more dignity in the time of the King, perhaps this movement would not have flourished and taken the direction it did with all the fifty years of wretchedness that followed.